Over time, I have built up a collection of non-google search engines that I can go to for various different types of searches.
In Firefox I have a keyword set (through a bookmark) for each of these. This means that I can prepend the keyword to any search to use that search engine. For example if I want to search for “art” using the marginalia search engine I can enter “!marg art”.
General purpose
- duck duck go - this is my go-to search engine, provides good results for most things. i have it set as my default.
- infotiger - I actually don’t end up using this very often as it fulfils a similar purpose to duck duck go and isn’t always as good but definitely my backup if anything were to happen to ddg. It definitely favours less commercial websites than ddg which can be good.
- alexandria - mixed results.
Indie websites
If you are looking for a small or independent website.
- marginalia - really shines when searching about a topic.
- indieseek.xyz - a very curated search engine. This makes finding anything specific (even specific topics) hard but all the links are high-quality. A good starting point for a search.
- wiby - a lot of very old fashioned results which can be fun to see.
- Search my site - Mixture of results that often contains very interesting blogs and personal websites.
Wikis
- Wikipedia - yes it’s not really a search engine but still an extremely useful source of information. I also recommend finding the wikis that are relevant to you - there are ones for nearly every topic and hobby! Here are some examples of Wikis for games that I play:
- Dwarf Fortress Wiki
- THE FINALS Community Wiki
- Fistful of Frags Wiki
Academic
- CORE - Great collection of open access papers.
- RefSeek - a academic orientated search engine that isn’t just for papers. Search results seem to be high quality.
Documentation
- MDN Web Docs - Reference for everything web related.
- Jekyll docs - Docs for the static site generator I use here.
- HTTP Status Codes Guide - More in-depth detail on status codes that MDN.
Reverse image search
- TinyEye - works surprisingly well.
I’ll continue to update this if I find more - if you know of any that you think I might like I would love you to email me at tomjbrandis [at] gmail [dot] com.
I also might try and make my own search engine at some point for fun. It’s just an idea at this point and it probably wouldn’t be able to compete with any of these but we’ll see what happens with that.
Changes
09/12/24 - add “wibi” and “search my site”